Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NCSA, one of five regional supercomputer centers established since 1985 by the National Science Foundation, is rapidly emerging as a leader in scientific graphics. Last year, for instance, Artist Donna Cox and Computer Scientist Ray Idaszak helped Caltech Astrophysicist Charles Ross Evans produce a short videotape depicting what in theory would occur in the collision of two neutron stars. To the untrained eye, the colliding stars look more like exotic flowers than a cosmic catastrophe. But the colors all have a quantitative meaning: areas colored red are ten times as dense as yellow ones, and yellow represents 100 times...
...Some scientists warn against going overboard with the new technique. Says James Blinn, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who created some of NASA's most spectacular computer simulations of planetary flybys: "Sometimes a half- baked idea gets printed up prettily and gets more attention than it deserves." Still, Blinn believes, as long as the scientific data used to generate the images are accurate, computer graphics can prod scientists to move in exciting new directions. NCSA's Upson agrees. "If we play our cards right," he says, "we may actually make a dent in how people do science...
Beyond such charges, what really seemed at issue was a long-standing tension in U.S. academic circles between two groups -- physical, or "hard," scientists such as chemists, physicists and biologists, whose work traces cause-effect relationships and lends itself to mathematical proofs, and social, or "soft," scientists such as sociologists, psychologists and political scientists, whose work involves speculation about human motives and mixes subjective evaluation with fact. A political scientist, for example, cannot prove mathematically that Hitler's political regime was an inevitable consequence of Germany's post-World War I disarray, but he can make a pretty good case...
...Washington debates, Huntington drew some vehement support, particularly among the NAS's 177 social scientists, who have been admitted since membership criteria were widened 16 years ago to provide a broader social context for counsel to the Government. One social-scientist member said in a speech, "His work is quite impressive, and he is a very fine scholar and a good scientist." After the vote, Huntington defended equations in his writings as "simply a way of summing up a complicated argument." He added, "Good Lord, any good social scientist knows the things he studies are constantly changing, full of exceptions...
Nevertheless, at least a third of the 527 members meeting in Washington (the proportion needed to bar an election) seem to have been swayed by Lang's underlying argument that social scientists, however eminent, may not belong to the NAS and perhaps should form an academy of their own. Says one physical scientist: "It's not enough to be excellent. One has to meet the norms of science as well." But that view leaves wide open the question of who, inside the NAS or out, ought to define those norms...